How to Change TXT Encoding

While most modern TXT files are encoded us UTF-8, this is not always the case. (Please see a historical note below.)

Before plain text files could be shown correctly, you sometimes need to select the correct Text Encoding first.  It can be done in the Settings menu of an opened TXT file:

Historical Note. When computers only started to develop, and disk space was very valuable, text files were encoded using only one byte per character, offering only 256 unique character codes. However, different national alphabets for different languages contain many more characters than that. So people started developing different Text Encodings, which are mappings of 256 possible byte codes to particular characters in a particular alphabet. Plus, different platforms (Mac, DOS, Windows) used different mapping schemes. It all resulted in a vast variety of text encodings (like MacRoman, DOSLatin1, WindowsGreek, WindowsCyrillic, and many many others). In other words, a text encoding is a set of rules to store a national alphabet character as one or more bytes of a physical file. Later, the Unicode standard was born. Unicode uses two or more bytes per single character, offering a universal scheme that includes most of the characters of most of the world`s languages. And to make things even more fun, Unicode has different schemes for storing those multi-byte characters in a physical file (UTF8, UTF16BE, UTF16LE). So if you open your TXT-file and see an unreadable mess, you should probably choose the correct Text Encoding.